The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 09 eBook

THE LIFE OF OTTO LUDWIG

By A.R. HOHLFELD, Ph.D.

Professor of German Literature, University of Wisconsin

The career of Otto Ludwig belongs to a sad period
in nineteenth century literature in Germany.
Sad not because of any lack of works of originality
and power, but sad because of the wanton neglect with
which the German public of those years treated its
ablest and most forceful writers. The historian
Treitschke, in an essay probably written not long
after the death of Otto Ludwig, sarcastically says
in direct reference to the latter’s tragic life:
“No nation reads more books than ours, none
buys fewer.” To be sure, Germany was then
a poor country and its readers had some excuse for
being economical in supplying their literary wants.
But there was no excuse for the notorious narrowness
of vision and judgment shown by many of the leading
critics, theatres, and literary journals of that time.
Writers of mediocre talent were praised to the skies.
But old Grillparzer, Hebbel and Ludwig, Keller, Raabe,
Storm, and others who brought a really new and vital
message were left to bear the burden of neglect, if
not of animosity. No wonder that in foreign lands,
after the middle of the nineteenth century, contemporary
German literature fell into an almost universal disrepute
from which it is only slowly recovering at present.
Foreign critics were justified in judging the significance
of the literary output of Germany by those writers
on whom the Germans themselves were placing the seal
of national approval. Zschokke, Gerstaecker,
Auerbach, Spielhagen, not to mention the ubiquitous
Muehlbach or Marlitt or Polko—­these were
the names which in America, for instance, figured
most prominently in the magazines between 1850 and
1880. [Illustration: OTTO LUDWIG] [Blank Page]
Their works were reviewed and translated. They
were considered as the representatives of Germany
in the literary parliament of nations, while those
of her men of letters whom we have since learned to
recognize as the real forces of her mid-century literature
remained unknown. Of Ludwig, who clearly belongs
to this more select group, the Atlantic Monthly
and the North American Review, for obvious reasons,
reviewed at some length his Studies in Shakespeare;
but, as far as the present writer’s knowledge
goes, not one of his works was ever translated in
this country until the Hereditary Forester appeared
in Poet Lore only a few years ago.

Otto Ludwig was born in 1813 in Eisfeld, a small town
picturesquely situated in the foothills of the southern
slope of the Thuringian Forest, and his entire life
was spent within the limited confines of Thuringia
and Saxony. Leipzig and Dresden, not much over
one hundred English miles to the northeastward of
Eisfeld, were the only two larger cities with which
he ever became acquainted, and, even when living there,
it was characteristic of him to take refuge in some